Elizabeth Yeampierre, the executive director of UPROSE, said that the conversation is more important than ever on the heels of a pandemic that disproportionately impacted Black and Latino New Yorkers. The Environmental Justice For All Act, she said “gives [BIPOC communities] the opportunity to fight for our right to breathe.”
“We are the ones who lost families to COVID; we knew the people in our families would die because they were living next to pollution, next to toxic exposure in the midst of power plants that were sited because people thought they could, because they believed that we were powerless,” Yeampierre said. “Today… we’re walking in our power, we have legislators standing with us.”
By Rachel Vick